Harvard's Brightest Minds Invent... Sprayable Cake?

Ah, cake—without question one of mankind's most magnificent inventions.

It’s a symbol of each year we spend with breath in our lungs, a sugary custom that brings us together at weddings, a comforting presence at grocery stores.

We look at cake, and we see the face of humanity.

Harvard undergrads Brooke Nowakowski and John McCallum understand how important cake is—a fact made evident by the startup they've co-founded. Together, they've brought a miraculous product called Spray Cake into being, and in doing so have opened up a world of delectable possibilities for the lazy, busy, and impatient.

Spray Cake is exactly what it sounds like: cake batter you spray, whipped cream–style, from a can. The batter goes directly into a pan or dish, and the resulting cake can be baked in either an oven or a microwave. It’s that easy, and it’s ready in minutes.

McCallum told KNOE 8 News that the idea came together as his final project for the popular Harvard class Science and Cooking. “I combined some concepts we learned about baking and whipped cream,” he said. “It was really that simple.”

We think it's a genius idea, and it seems the judges of the 2014 Harvard Innovation Challenge did, too. They awarded the startup $10,000, a prize that Nowakowski and McCallum hope will help put Spray Cake on store shelves—and in our stomachs—by the end of the summer.

That seems a bit ambitious to us, but in the age of Kickstarter, it'll probably be a piece of cake.

Source: Bostinno Hero image: Flickr user "wilsonh" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)